2013-01-30

I've seen the future, brother - it is... mountainous?

If I have been a little quiet during these last few days, then for good reason: I've been in the final stages of negotiating my next paid job. And what can I say: yesterday, I signed it. The guys who hire me are some absolutely lovely chaps from the United Kingdom known as Skybound Studios Ltd. Skybound are a group of amazingly talented people, each of them with their own credit. Now they've decided to make games, and their next project is together with me.

At this point, I cannot say much, only that the project involves mountains of some importance, and that it's set in the year 1628. And - it's not a visual novel. It's going to be a classic graphic adventure game, my first step into that new world. VNs and adventures have a lot in common, as I detailed in these two presentations I held in London for the AdventureX convention last winter, and I hope to make this game a fine example of how both genres can profit from one another.

Another example of a multi-genre game, by the way, would be DaFool's Elspeth's Garden, which I incidentally also wrote the script for. Elspeth's Garden is a round-based tactical game / visual novel hybrid, one where you fight a war not only on the military but also on the diplomatic front, so your words are just as important as your deeds. (Actually, only nearly as important, because you cannot, well, get a "game over" in the diplomacy parts, but you certainly can make your military work a lot harder if you fail to gain allies with good diplomacy.)

Right now, Elspeth's Garden is still in production, but I have high hopes that DaFool will be able to finish and release it somewhere this year, so you might want to bookmark his website along with mine.